Add and edit subtitles and captions

Learn how to add and edit open or closed captions to video in Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Easily change the font, color, size, style and position using this guide.

If you want to follow along with this tutorial, use the Captions Media assets. Click Save to Creative Cloud to copy the assets to your account.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC allows you to create open and closed captions with flexible options for font, color, size, and position. Open captions are always visible, unlike closed captions which viewers can enable and disable on their TV set.

Let's look at the way captions work in Premiere Pro. To follow along, copy the assets that accompany this tutorial to your creative cloud account. I have a sequence opened already and I've got a couple of stretches of voiceover.

Let's have a listen to the first part. I'm gonna start by creating an open caption. So I'm gonna go to the New Item menu at the bottom of the Project panel and I'm going to choose Captions. The first New Captions dialog gives you settings for the caption that are based on your current sequence. You've got things like the Height, and Width, and Timebase and so on.

I'm gonna click OK on here. And now I can specify Caption Standard. You'll notice that we've got CEA-608, and CEA-708, Teletext, and Open Captions. If you're working on standard def, you're probably using,608 and HD, it'll be 708. In this instance, I'm gonna start with Open Captions because these give us a few more options, and I'll click OK.

Before I do that, I should mention you've also got the option to specify which stream you're using. Now this isn't relevant for Open Captions, which are onscreen all the time, but they are relevant for the CEA-608 and 708 captions because you can specify more than one stream for your media.
I'm gonna go back into Open Captions and click OK. You edit captions into a sequence in Premiere Pro in much the same way that you'd edit a graphic in. So here's my New Captions item, and I'm just gonna drag this up to my video 4 track and line it up with my voiceover. If I position my playhead over the caption, you can see the text waiting to be updated. Though captions behave a little bit like titles, you don't use the title designer to adjust them. In fact there's a dedicated Captions panel under the Window menu with additional options that relate specifically to Caption Text.

Here, I'm going to change the text and in fact I've already got the text in the titles for some graphics I've imported into this project. I just put this in so you could see me copy and paste it.

So here, I'm selecting the text, and I'm copying it with Ctrl + C, that would be Command + C on Mac OS. I'm gonna select the caption, go back into the Captions panel, and now I'm pressing Ctrl + V or Command + V on Mac OS. And you can see the text updates right away.

Many of the settings in this panel should be pretty familiar to you, you can specify a font, you can choose whether it's Regular, Bold, and so on, specify a size, and you can give it an Edge stroke if you want as well. And you can also choose things like the justification, if it's Bold, Italic and so on here.

You'll notice there's also an option to insert a musical note. And that's if you want to indicate that there are lyrics being sung. Here also, we've got three buttons that allow us to specify what this colors swatch is for and this eyedropper. We've got the Background Color, Edge Color. And we've got the text color...

Let's go for a nice bright red. And of course, the caption updates on screen. Remember, these are open captions which are always going to be visible. When you're choosing the background color, you also have the option to specify a level of Opacity. See I'm dropping this down to 31% and it's becoming semi-transparent. Let's leave that back on 100% for now.

Next over, we've got this control to specify where on screen the caption is going to appear. And of course, this is particularly useful if you've got multiple speakers and you want their text to appear and disappear at different times. I can click to set the position to the top of the screen, the center or the middle or left, and right, and so on, and you've also got dedicated X and Y position controls in case you want to make subtle adjustments.

Now that I'm all set, I'm going to want to add another caption. And to do that, I'm going to extend the duration of my caption item here in the timeline. I'm just gonna click on the edge of the caption and I'm gonna trim this using a rolling trim and just pull this out to pretty much the end of the sequence.

So what you're seeing here is one caption item inside of which there is a specific caption, that's the first part of the text. I'm gonna click at the bottom of the Captions panel to add another caption. And you'll notice, it appears right next to the first one and you can see from these timecode entries that one begins right after the other.
Let's get the text from my bin, select the text, copy, select my caption, click in the box and paste, and now you can see I've got my second caption. Of course, it's in the wrong spot. I could adjust the timecode references if I want to but I can also click and drag to pull this over actually on the timeline and click and drag to adjust the duration.

If I move my playhead over you can see there's the text. You can also right click in the lower part of the caption item and choose to Add Caption. And when you do, the caption will be added where you clicked. So it's a little bit quicker for specifying the start point for a caption. Let's get this last bit of text, copy, go back into the caption, and paste, and now again, I'll address the duration to suit.

Now everything I've been showing you so far is open captions and these have a few more options for things like fonts and colors than you'll find in closed captions. If I go back to my Project panel...We'll just collapse these bins a little bit and go back into the New Item menu and chose Captions, click OK on the Standard settings for the caption. And now I'm gonna choose CEA-708 and click OK. And I'll just rename this so we can tell the difference. Let's call this a "Closed Caption."

I'm gonna put this up on a new video track, Premiere Pro will add this for me automatically. We'll just scroll up so you can see that and resize the item to cover the entire duration of the sequence. I'm just gonna turn off visibility for the open caption I made and select this new closed caption above.

Initially, you might not see anything. I'm gonna see this caption here if I move my playhead over to it, but if you've got the wrong caption standard set, you might not see any captions at all. Right now my Program Monitor is set to CEA-708, which is correct, but if I set this to 608 and click OK, nothing comes up at all.

One last thing to mention about these captions, if I just go back in and correct that setting. Is you'll notice, you have a few less options in the Captions panel. For example, if you choose the color swatch, you'll notice that there is a very limited range of options available. And that's because there's a standard that defines the way captions are displayed on TVs and those standards are reflected in the settings here.

So that's working with open and closed captions in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

Learn how to add open or closed captions to video. Easily change the font, color, size, style and position with Premiere Pro. Open captions are always visible, unlike closed captions, which viewers can enable and disable on their screens.

Open your project in Premiere Pro and go to the New Item menu at the bottom of the Project panel and select Captions.